“Most ruins are – let’s face it – disappointing.”

Above: Bara, Syria - Link

I don’t mean all ruins, of course. I challenge anyone to find Pompeii or the Parthenon or the Colosseum disappointing or boring (though, according to Peter Green, William Golding did mount the Athenian Acropolis, muttering, “the bloody Parthenon again” and sit down firmly with his back to the monument gazing out at the Eleusis cement works). I mean those ivy clad mouldering walls of some third rate English Abbey or the pile of stray stones outside some jolly Cretan village which claim to be the remains of a Minoan rural settlement.

To most people in the world, this disappointment will not seem a great revelation, but to archaeologists and cultural theorists ruins are an object of intense interest (and so they are to me when I am wearing one of those hats). Archaeologists will bang on for hours about the minute significance of the position of one stone against the next. Cultural theorists will bang on even longer about ruins as a metaphor for the past, the fragility of human success, the melancholy of contemplating the death of the past, and so on.

The voice that most academics refuse to hear is that of most other people in the world who do not share this enthusiasm.

- Mary Beard @ Times Online: Link.

Reader comment:

Speaking of ‘broken down’ ruins, my favourite line overheard from some Americans in a taverna in Athens.

She: “We’re going to Knossos tomorrow.”

He: “No more ruins! I’ve had enough ruins.”

She: “But these ruins are different.”

He: “You mean they’re not destroyed?”

- Lucy @ Times Online: Link.

Archaeological treasure found Up North

Atop the highest hill in Walker, Minn., archaeologists have found what they believe to be evidence of the oldest human habitation in the state — perhaps 13,000 to 14,000 years old.

From the rough stone tools that were found, archaeologists are speculating that “we’re looking at certainly the relatively earliest occupants of the North American continent,” said Matt Mattson, a biologist and archaeologist who worked on the project for the Leech Lake Heritage Sites Program, which is based near Cass Lake.

They would be related to those who, according to conventional wisdom, came across the Bering Strait from Asia, Mattson said.

Britta Bloomberg, Minnesota’s deputy historic preservation officer, said it may be among the oldest known archaeological sites in North and South America.

… The stone tools found at Walker could have been used by big game hunters for butchering, chopping or scraping toward the end of the Ice Age.

Mattson speculated that the site could have been used by an extended family of 10 to 15 nomadic people moving through an “oasis,” in what is now north-central Minnesota, that was as close as five miles to remaining glaciers.

[Star Tribune]

See also KARE-11.

“U.S. Repatriates Historical Artifact to the Iraqi People”
- Press release: U.S. Embassy, Iraq

On Tuesday, July 25, 2006, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, Secretary for Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, and Iraqi Prime Minister Noori al-Maliki participated in a ceremony marking the repatriation of the diorite statue of Entemena to the Iraqi Government, at the Embassy of the Republic of Iraq.

Recovered this year by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement wing of the Department of Homeland Security, the statue of Entemena is deemed one of INTERPOL’s most significant recoveries.

Around April 2003, Iraqi cultural institutions and archaeological sites, including the Iraq National Museum, suffered extensive losses of invaluable cultural artifacts. Among the objects illegally taken from the Museum was the Statue of Entemena — a headless, statue of the 4th king in the dynasty of Lagash (modern al-Hiba, Iraq), ca. 2400 BC, excavated at Ur, Iraq.

The Statue of Entemena is the oldest known representation of a king of ancient Iraq. The statue is made of diorite (a rare hard black imported stone), stands approximately 30 inches high, and weighs approximately 300 pounds. The king is standing in the pose of a worshipper, hands folded in front, wearing a fleece skirt. Cuneiform inscriptions on his back and right upper arm tell us that the name of the statue is “Entemena Whom the God Enlil Loves” and that the statue was placed before the god in a temple.

The statue was excavated in the early 20th century in the temple precinct at Ur in southern Iraq by the joint expedition of the University of Pennsylvania and the British Museum, working under a permit from the Iraq Department of Antiquities. Since the text says it stood in Lagash, it must have been taken to Ur at a later time, perhaps as a war trophy.

In late 2005, confidential informants overseas notified DHS of the whereabouts of the statue. Around May 2006, the statue was recovered and shipped to the United States. The statue was authenticated around June 5 and remained in DHS custody.

[Link]

Interpol has pictures and case notes: Link.

Iraq Museum International reports: “Manhattan Art Dealer Helps Recover Priceless Iraq Museum Statue” –

Lebanese antiquities dealer Hicham Aboutaam believes this is a good time to consider investing in antiquities, but his refusal to handle the sale of an important statue stolen from the Iraq Museum led to its return to the people of Iraq.

After the looting of the Baghdad Museum in 2003, Aboutaam was approached in Lebanon by black market dealers offering to sell the headless statue of King Entemena.

Worth millions of dollars to collectors of illicit antiquities, the statue had made its way to Syria, and onto the FBI top 10 list of art heists.

Aboutaam, who sells antiquities to museums and collectors from his galleries in Geneva and New York, did the right thing and cooperated last year with agents from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) wing of the Department of Homeland Security.

Information supplied by Aboutaam helped INTERPOL track down the whereabouts of the statue, and just 2 months ago, it was recovered and shipped to the United States for authentication.

[Link]

The above article is favorable to Aboutaam specifically, and the collecting of antiquities generally. Note, Iraq Museum International (baghdadmuseum.org) is not to be confused with the National Museum of Iraq.

Hicham Aboutaam’s site.

The brothers Aboutaam have their critics, and a reputation for controversy: Aboutaam Brothers in the news

See also Museum-Security.org

FBI Top Ten Art Heists — Although the FBI apparently was not directly involved in the Entemena case, the Bureau does maintain an Art Crimes Team:

Art and cultural property crime — which includes theft, fraud, looting, and trafficking across state and international lines — is a looming criminal enterprise with estimated losses running as high as $6 billion annually.

To recover these precious pieces–and to bring these criminals to justice — the FBI uses a dedicated Art Crime Team of 12 Special Agents to investigate, supported by three Special Trial Attorneys for prosecutions…and it mans the National Stolen Art File, a computerized index of reported stolen art and cultural properties for the use of law enforcement agencies across the world.

[FBI: Link.]

A gem in one on Tutankhamun’s necklaces is “older than the earliest Egyptian civilisation”, and appears meteoric in origin, according to a recent report:

In 1996 in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Italian mineralogist Vincenzo de Michele spotted an unusual yellow-green gem in the middle of one of Tutankhamun’s necklaces.

The jewel was tested and found to be glass, but intriguingly it is older than the earliest Egyptian civilisation.

Working with Egyptian geologist Aly Barakat, they traced its origins to unexplained chunks of glass found scattered in the sand in a remote region of the Sahara Desert.

But the glass is itself a scientific enigma. How did it get to be there and who or what made it?

An Austrian astrochemist Christian Koeberl had established that the glass had been formed at a temperature so hot that there could be only one known cause: a meteorite impacting with Earth. And yet there were no signs of an impact crater, even in satellite images.

Mark Boslough, who specialises in modelling large impacts on supercomputers, created a simulation of a [meteoric airburst] …. The simulation revealed that an impactor could … generate a blistering atmospheric fireball, creating surface temperatures of 1,800C, and leaving behind a field of glass.

[BBC: Link]

Via Slashdot

Wikipedia: Tutankhamun

My brother the archaeologist sent me these comments about his work:

Dog burials have come up in our work in Kazakhstan on Botai culture sites. The Botai lived in pit houses whose door opened to the southwest. Outside the door, they would bury two sacrificed dogs, presumably as symbolic or supernatural guardians. If you look in the attached image showing a magnetic map of Botai houses, you will see pairs of small magnetic highs to the southwest of the larger (but weaker) square pit-houses. These have not been tested, but it is imagined that these pairs of anomalies may be dog sacrifices.

The Botai culture, by the way, are candidates for having been the earliest horse domesticators, and also (more speculatively) proto Indo-Europeans.

See also:

• Ritual Dog Burials @ USA Today
• Dog @ Wikipedia
• Burial @ Wikipedia
• Community Organisation Among Copper Age Sedentary Horse Pastoralists Of Kazakhstan — Sandra Olsen, Bruce Bradley, David Maki And Alan Outram — Pending

The world is so full of a number of things:

VISOKO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - Researchers in Bosnia … unearthed the first solid evidence that an ancient pyramid lies hidden beneath a massive hill — a series of geometrically cut stone slabs that could form part of the structure’s sloping surface.

“These are the first uncovered walls of the pyramid,” said Semir Osmanagić, a Bosnian archaeologist who studied the pyramids of Latin America for 15 years.

Earlier research on the hill, known as Visocica, found that it has perfectly shaped, 45-degree slopes pointing toward the cardinal points, and a flat top. Under layers of dirt, workers discovered a paved entrance plateau, entrances to tunnels and large stone blocks.

Satellite photographs and thermal imaging revealed two other, smaller pyramid-shaped hills in the Visoko Valley.
[Link]

Via Slashdot

Dino Avdibeg has translated and published a November 2005 press release from Semir Osmanagić, along with photos:

Next fase is expected to begin in April 2006. We will completely clean-up the area of bushes, and start with careful opening of 6 wide sections from all sids, in order to make pyramidal character of megalitic blocks visible to every layman. As a special project, we will start mapping the underground tunnel complex in cooperation with speleologists and geologists. We will also investigate the statements of the citizens regarding the existance of starways and a corridor at the socle of the pyramid.
[Link]